Cutting the trash in half may sound like an audacious goal, but it’s absolutely achievable. How do we know it can be done? Because we’ve already done it, in more than 50 cities and towns around the country. And there’s nothing standing in the way of doing it everywhere else too.

We’re on this mission because garbage in the US is a broken system, with perverse incentives that actually encourage waste and sap tremendous taxpayer resources. While with every other utility, we pay only for what we use (think water, electricity, or gas), most Americans pay a flat fee to dispose of their trash. That means we don’t really have any incentive to create less waste. (Can you imagine if, say, our water system were built this way? You’d pay the same amount to conserve every drop as you would to leave the faucet running full-blast while you spent the day at work!)

This is where pay-as-you-throw, or PAYT, comes in. With PAYT, people are charged only for each bag or other unit of waste they create—and no more. “Metering” trash like the utility that it is gives everybody the incentive to reduce their trash volume and divert their waste into more productive uses, such as recycling and composting. When they do that, they’re helping their towns and cities save money on the tipping fees they spend to bury or burn their trash, and they’re helping them make money from the sale of recyclable goods. They’re contributing to job growth in the booming recycling economy. And they’re reducing the amount of greenhouse gases and incinerator ash in the air and chemical leachate in the water and soil.

We’re on a mission, but we can’t get there on our own. We welcome the support of other like-minded people who want to see better-managed municipal finances and cleaner air, water, and soil to help us spread the word about this powerful solution to the garbage crisis. What can you do? Talk to your local government about pay-as-you-throw. Talk to your neighbors about it. Keep reading this blog. Share it when you read a post that connects with you.

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We’re all used to hearing the knock on waste reduction initiatives: if they’re effective, they’re expensive–and if they don’t cost very much, they don’t do very much. Right? Wrong. One of the most impressive things about the pay-as-you-throw model is that it breaks that paradigm, simultaneously bringing cities and towns profound waste reduction while also making a […]

It’s Town Meeting Season in New England, when people fill up high school gyms and libraries to vote on things like town budgets, school funding, road repairs… and, sometimes, pay-as-you-throw. Most years, people in at least a few towns in the region find a way to get PAYT on the ballot. That’s what happened in Hopkinton, N.H., […]